How hard is it to make an RPGmaker game for someone who knows nothing about coding/programming?

[Deleted member 130450]

I'm interested in trying to make a simple H-game but I would also like to incorporate a couple of features like day-night cycle, dynamic world (such as NPCs having different dialouge after a certain event happened), corruption points and how it affects NPC's dialouge with the player, etc.

I assume making these features will require some coding/programming? I don't mind investing some time to learning the basics of coding though.

 

[basnalex]

I know almost nothing about RPGmaker (besides just playing around with it) but it seems to have a decent plugin ecosystem that may help with common features like day/night.

I'm sure someone can correct me, but there is a variable system in RPGmaker and you could easily use that to build interactions with NPCs that change as events happen or add corruption points to a character. For example, if you had a variable of slainOgre, then all NPCs could update their greeting from 'Hey peasant' to 'Hey Ogre Slayer' when the variable slainOgre variable is set to true.

 

[Synx]

I have worked with rpgmaker a bit, and you really don't need any coding skills. Rpgmaker uses an event system which has kind of translated the basic coding to click and paste functions. It still requires some coding knowledge, but the parts you want are pretty simple to create, and you can properly find a tutorial to make something you want, for anything you can come up with.

And it has a shit ton of plug ins for anything that's a bit harder to create with the basic event system. There is one guy that has created several hundred plugins for Rpgmaker.

 

[Jakalair]

I have been making a game in my spare time and it is not too challenging to do the things you want, with or without plugins.
To make day night for instance you just set a variable and have an event shift the color palette or use a plugin.
The corruption is just a variable, the NPC dialog is doable with a system already in the game where it changes the NPC reaction depending on the variables set up.
I don't know how hard this would be if I had never used a programming language before, but it all operates like BASIC from my C64 days.

 

[oldboggy]

Echoing what the others have said, you can do quite a bit with RPGMaker (in particular the features you described) without much coding knowledge beyond the idea of an "if then else". The real programming aspect comes into play when you turn to the scripting side but here most games just use the plug-ins (scripts to either add to the code or extra JavaScript files) and usually the author (or some fan) gives detailed instructions on how to add them and use them. Having looked at the code of a few very nice games, it is clear that the authors' skills were in graphics and story telling, definitely not programming design.

In other words, just give it a try. If you are going to buy RPGMaker, Steam often has it on sale cheap.

 

[lancelotdulak]

rpgmaker is laughed at by the programmers and artists on the site for a reason. Also it guarantees only 1% of your potential customers will ever even consider it.

Use renpy or unity.
Unity is easy to use and extremely powerful.
Renpy is easy to use and can do most things with some work.
For the kind of thing i think you envision you really need to learn some programming. Dont worry it isnt rocket science. All programming is math. All programming is logic. You learn the very BASICS of a language then you look up/learn what you need as you need it. That is what all programmers do from f95 renpybuilder to the people who wrote your favorite AAA game.

 

[DS23G]

rpgmaker is laughed at by the programmers and artists on the site for a reason. Also it guarantees only 1% of your potential customers will ever even consider it.

There are alot of really good japanese games that were made using rpgmaker, so I wouldn't agree to this statement in general. You can create a quality h-rpg if you got your own custom assets and add some plug-ins into the mix.

What you absolutely should not do is create anything else than an actual rpg when using rpgmaker. If you wanna develop a VN, use renpy or unity.

 

[Zachy]

You need zero to none programming experience if you want to make a game with RPG Maker.

However, to make a good game, different from the others, you'll need to learn some Ruby/Javascript you want it or not.
You may as well be able to create other game genres as you get more experience. Don't pay attention to what the other people say, since if you're a good dev, you'll probably manage to do it.